Jaimeo Brown draws on old field recordings of worksongs, adding his percussive giftings and even animation in this imaginative video, part of his Transcendance Project.
Gee’s Bend Quilting
I’ve also heard Jaimeo Brown paying tribute to how the women quilters of Gee’s Bend brought art out of necessity – making quilts to keep the family warm while living in shacks. (His own wife is a quilter.) There’s a short video of his meeting with the Alhabama quilters here:
And if you haven’t already encountered the instinctive art of the quilts, please look at my earlier blog on it, here.
For more on Jaimeo Brown’s work, check out his website: https://www.jaimeobrown.com/transcendence
And if you’d like to see him perform with loops and also speak a little at the end – check out his recent taking part in a Jazz Vespers at St Peter’s New York:
Jaimeo speaks at timeline 53 mins 27 secs in this video
“This Transcendence project is based on early African-American traditions and how they used music to transcend incredible adversity and I think that, for me, what’s been exciting about it for me has been the actual research of the project – I’ve got a chance to go to do a lot of work at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian and the African-American Museum in Washington DC and listen to old reel-to-reel recordings of the very earliest African-American spirituals and work songs and digging through that found a lot of inspiration for my work … some of that earliest materials is really the foundation of a lot of the music which we listen to today – which would be jazz-related, blues-related, gospel…”
Comma And 